It's a familiar story to many of us: In prehistoric times, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Women were not physically capable of hunting because their anatomy was different from men. And because men were hunters, they drove human evolution.
  • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    195·
    1 year ago

    This claim comes from 2 people

    You do realize that their papers are linked in the article and have references, correct?

    If you actually have doubts about their underlying claims, I’d encourage taking a look at those.

    Here’s an anecdote from a peer anthropologist who was a fan of their work and interviewed for a different story on it:

    In 2018 Haas was part of a team in Peru that found a 9,000-year-old person buried with an unusually large number of hunting tools. “We all just assumed this individual was a male,” he recalls. "Everybody is sitting around, saying things like, ‘Wow! This is amazing. He must have been a great hunter, a great warrior. Maybe he was a chief!’ "

    Haas didn’t even think to question the person’s gender until about a week later, when a colleague who specialized in analyzing bone structure arrived and delivered a bombshell assessment: The remains seemed to be female.

    The team then used a technology newly available to the field. Scraping the enamel from the teeth found in the grave, they found proteins that confirmed it unequivocally: This apparent master hunter was female.

    These kinds of “oops, it turns out someone assumed male was female/intersex” finds have been happening quite frequently over the past few years if you’ve been following the field at all.